26-05-2012, 05:22 PM
Semi-autonomous Color Line-Following Educational Robots
Semi-autonomous Color Line-Following Educational Robots.pdf (Size: 729.11 KB / Downloads: 63)
I. INTRODUCTION
Today, there is a growing thrust towards the
familiarization of children with technology. Popular
interest in robotics has increased astonishingly recently and
robotics is seen by many as offering major new benefits in
education at all levels. Human-robot interaction is a novel
and growing field of research, which has given the
opportunity to teachers to develop new efficient and
entertaining methods of teaching [1]. In addition, the
children, by playing with robots and interacting with them,
begin to familiarize themselves early with technology, which
will be proven to them useful in the future.
DESCRIPTION OF THE GAME
Current technology allows the development of new and
entertaining methods of teaching. By using colorful, bright,
sound-delivering and highly mobile robots, a teacher can
easily attract the attention of children, familiarize them to
new technologies, and teach them skills such as cooperation,
patience and team spirit in a fun way. A robot-based
Semi-autonomous Color Line-Following Educational Robots:
Design and Implementation
Michail Makrodimitris, Student Member, IEEE, Alexandros Nikolakakis, and
Evangelos Papadopoulos, Senior Member, IEEE
competition can also teach children how to set goals, plan
strategies, and master decision-making under pressure. With
these in mind, we proceeded to design the following game.
GAME ARCHITECTURE
In the game, eight robots and an equal number of touch
panels exist. With the help of the touch panels, the users
control the robot speed, the direction of motion (forward or
reverse) and the colored line that the robot will follow after
reaching a node. Each robot is controlled by a specific touch
panel only. Apart from user commands, a touch panel
constantly sends information to the robot, concerning its
current status. When a collision occurs, the robot in addition
to knowing its own mode, it should be aware of the mode of
the other robot it collided onto, so that points are allocated
correctly. In the case of multiple collisions, the system must
be aware which robot collided with which. This information
could not be sent from the touch panels to the robots because
of bandwidth constraints.
HARDWARE DESIGN
Due to room limitations, the arena size had to be constrained
by a 6 m x 6 m square and by the requirement that users
should be able to recognize and watch their robots from their
position easily. On the other hand, the arena should not be
very small to allow for a number of players stand around it.
Finally, a square arena with 5 m sides was constructed. The
arena contains colored path lines (red, blue and green), see
Fig. 1, that meet in groups of three at node points. The path
line width was selected to be 4 cm for visibility.
SOFTWARE DESIGN
The software implementation of the color line-following
robot game involves three different programs. (a) The
program of a robot, (b) the program of a touch panel and ©
the program of the server. As each of the above three
modules is equipped with a PIC microcontroller, the
programming was made using C with the help of a MicroC
compiler. Programming a touch panel is easy as its only task
is sending ASCII letter commands and implementing easy
serial protocols or communicating with an LCD, which our
compiler provides us with easy library commands.